Pain and Agony

I mentioned last week that I thought I had broken my toe. I can now pretty much confirm that I definitely broke it. (Or so says Rosencrantz. She took one look at the nasty bruising and swollen toe, and - after saying "EWWWWW!!!" - agreed that her foot looked much the same when she broke a toe.) I'm relying on my thimbleful of medical knowledge rather than going to the doctor at the moment, because a) I'm broke, and b) it's just a toe. I know there isn't a whole heck of a lot that doctors can do about a broken toe except suggest ice packs, over-the-counter pain remedies, and splinting the toe against its neighboring tootsie. I learned that much from WebMD, and I didn't receive a hefty bill for an intermediate length office visit.

All because I wasn't really paying attention and stubbed my toe on the vacuum cleaner on my way to take a bath. Oh well. It doesn't really hurt all that much, and much of the bruising has already started to fade. It's still a little swollen around the base of the toe, though.

The remarkable thing about all of this is that this is the first bone I have ever broken. In the almost 34 years (21 shopping days til my birthday!) that I have been on the face of the earth, I have spent much of it being a professional-quality klutz. I'm the type of person that really does walk into doors. If I bang my knee on something (and I do... quite often), there will be a nasty bruise there turning a multitude of colors for at least a week. I may be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, but there's always a good chance that my ankle may decide to go a different way than the rest of my body and I'll end up pitching forward on my face, twisting my ankle and swallowing my gum.

I mean, do you know how humiliating it is to be taken to the emergency room on your birthday with lumbar strain because your back decided to go kaput while you were bent over tying your shoes? This actually happened to me. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, lacing up my boots so I could go to my birthday lunch with my family, and suddenly I couldn't sit up straight. So rather than going to the Blue Gibbon, my family took me to the urgent care facility, where I was given 600 mg ibuprofen and a bill for my copay. If I had known that would be the diagnosis, I would have just popped 3 Advils and gone on to get my sweet and sour chicken.

Not that my klutziness deterred me from at least trying to be active. I enjoyed riding my bike when I was a kid, but I certainly didn't enjoy careening into that telephone pole at the end of my block. (I still have a scar on my knee from this.) Nor did I enjoy surpassing my personal best in a bikeathon (60 miles) by hitting some loose gravel and skidding to the final checkpoint on my hip. I really enjoyed swimming, but didn't enjoy my arms giving out while I was trying to hoist myself out of the pool and smacking into the pool side face first. Once I landed on my chin (small scar still there as well), and once I implanted my teeth into the concrete and chipped my front tooth. Ow, ow, ow.

Of course, my "favorite" swimming accident is still the one that occurred when I had gone on vacation with my parents and several other families to Florida. We were all staying in the same condominium, and the whole group (about 20 of us) were hanging out around the pool. It was after the posted time, and the lights in the pool had been turned off, but management didn't really care if we were still there eating pizza and drinking beer. The younger kids were playing Marco Polo in the deep end, and I (being much too cool for Marco Polo since I was on my junior high school swim team) decided to swim laps width-wise in the shallow end. Which went fine until I misjudged the distance between me and the side of the pool while doing my butterfly laps.

WHAM!!!

I stood up, my hands immediately flying to my face. I was sure I'd broken my nose. My hands were covered in blood when I pulled them away. I needed help, big time.

Only problem was I was in mild shock and was too freaked out to actually call anyone's attention to my plight, and no one had noticed that I was standing in the 4 foot area with blood trickling down my face. I don't know how long I stood there before one of my parents' friends turned around, beer in hand, and yelled for my mom. I remember being helped out of the pool, throwing on some dry clothes, and being rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital. I remember sitting in the waiting room watching Solid Gold with a towel pressed to my nose.

As it turned out, I hadn't broken my nose, but I had a large nasty cut on the upper left bridge which required stitches. My mother, who doesn't do well with blood, was shooed out of the room when she nearly passed out watching the doctor stitch up the cut. (I wasn't exactly enjoying it, either. Try watching a needle headed directly for your eye, then feel the doctor pulling the stitch tight. Repeat a few times. Not my idea of a good time.)

Of course, the funniest part of this whole situation was paying the bill. It was in the infancy days of HMOs, and it turned out that the hospital didn't accept our insurance, which meant we would have to pay out of pocket. (Our HMO would reimburse us when we got home to file, but that was still a week away.) My parents hadn't budgeted for an emergency room visit on this vacation, so my dad turned to me and informed me that since he was paying for this, I had used up my portion of the food fund and would therefore not get to eat for the rest of the the trip. Knowing my family's sense of humor, I shrugged and answered with an understanding OK.

The nurse processing my discharge didn't get the joke. She thought my father was really going to starve me for the rest of the week. So she's looking at my father, trying to decide whether she should call Child Services on him, and my mother is desparately trying to reassure her that he was kidding and I would still be fed.

The bad part of the entire injury was that I was not able to get the stitches wet, which meant I didn't get to swim for the rest of the vacation. I spent the week pacing in the shallow end, wishing it was Friday so I could get the stitches removed.

Maybe in retrospect it was a good thing that my school cut the swim team. I shudder to think of what kind of freak injuries I would have suffered if I had ever made the diving team.

More stupid injuries to come. This is just the tip of the iceberg....